Nobody Wants Your Funding Round

Indian trade and business inboxes carry a paid-coverage layer, so a cold pitch is assessed as an attempt to buy space before it is read as a story. Paid placement also falls inside Google’s link spam policies, which closes the easy route entirely. Three pitches get through it: being available as a source on the day something happens, bringing a number nobody else holds, and correcting something published wrongly. None of the three is an announcement about your own company.

Before you write a pitch, it is worth picturing where it lands.

An Indian trade journalist opens a laptop in the morning to somewhere between forty and a few hundred emails. Most are press releases. Many are from PR agencies retained to send press releases. A meaningful share are, in substance, offers to pay for coverage — because paid features, sponsored placements and syndicated release distribution are openly sold products in this market.

So the reflex when an unfamiliar business email arrives is not what is this story. It is is this someone trying to buy space.

That reflex is the thing standing between you and every link this activity is supposed to earn.

The paid layer, and why it is closed to you

The obvious response is to pay. It is available, it is priced, and plenty of Indian agencies sell it as digital PR.

It is also the thing our article on link building sets out in detail: payment, product exchange and commercial arrangement all sit inside Google’s link spam policies. A paid placement carrying a followed link is the exact object the policy describes.

Which produces an unhelpful position. The easy route is closed to you for SEO purposes, and the hard route — actual editorial coverage — is harder than it would otherwise be, because everyone taking the easy route has trained the inbox to expect it.

The way through is to be visibly not that. Which mostly means sending something a person selling coverage would never send.

Nobody wants your funding round

The standard Indian business pitch announces something about the business. A round raised. A product launched. An office opened. A tenth anniversary. An award received, frequently one the business paid to enter.

None of these are stories to anyone outside the company. A journalist covering your sector is not short of companies doing things. They are short of three specific items.

Pitch one: the source who is available today

Something happens in your sector — a rule changes, a large player does something unexpected, a platform alters its terms. Several journalists are writing about it now, today, and each of them needs somebody who works in the field to say what it means in practice.

This is the highest-yield pitch available to a small business and almost nobody in India uses it, because it requires you to notice the news and respond the same day.

The mechanic worth internalising: a journalist filing this afternoon will take an adequate quote available now over an excellent quote available on Thursday. Availability beats quality more often than anyone admits. If you can reply within a few hours with three sentences that are specific and quotable, you are competing against silence.

Set up alerts for the terms that matter in your sector. When something moves, write two paragraphs explaining what it means for businesses like your clients, and send it to the two or three people who cover that area — unprompted, no attachment, no request.

Some of those go nowhere. Some become a quote. A quote becomes a mention, and mentions become the reason the next email gets opened.

Pitch two: the number nobody has

Journalists writing about an industry are chronically short of Indian data. Most published figures are global, or estimates, or from a vendor with an interest.

You are sitting on numbers as a byproduct of operating. What things actually cost. How long processes actually take. What proportion of something fails. Not a commissioned survey — the ordinary observations of doing the work, aggregated and anonymised.

Our article on becoming the firm with the benchmark covers publishing that material on your own site. Pitching it is the separate act, and the pitch is short: here is a figure, here is how we measured it, here is the sample size, use it if it is useful.

Two conditions make this work. It has to be genuinely yours, so nobody can get it elsewhere. And you have to state the method honestly, including the limits, because a journalist who uses a number and gets challenged on it will not come back.

A firm with one such figure, updated annually, becomes a standing reference in its sector. That is a slow asset and a durable one.

Pitch three: the correction

The least used and the most effective for building an actual relationship.

Something published about your sector is wrong. A figure is out of date, a rule is misdescribed, a technical claim is backwards. You know this because you work in it.

Write to the person who filed it. Be brief, be specific, cite what the correct position is and where it comes from, and do not ask for anything. No link request, no mention of your company beyond the signature.

Journalists remember the people who stop them being wrong, because being wrong in public is the thing they most want to avoid. You are not pitching a story. You are becoming the person they check with.

The link, when it comes, arrives months later in a piece you did not pitch.

The mechanics people get wrong

The pitch goes in the body of the email. No attachment, no deck, no PDF.

It goes to the person who wrote the most recent relevant article, not to a generic editorial address. Finding that name takes two minutes and changes the odds substantially.

The subject line says what the email contains, plainly. Not a teaser.

Length: shorter than feels right. Three or four sentences and an offer to expand.

Follow up once. Then stop. A second follow-up moves you from unread to blocked, and there is no version of this activity where volume compensates for relevance.

And do not send the same email to forty publications with the name changed. It is visible, it reads as exactly the thing the inbox is defended against, and it is also close to the pattern Google describes when it talks about outreach conducted at scale for links.

The press release, answered plainly

It gets asked every time, so: a wire-distributed press release is a notification instrument and not a link instrument.

What it produces is the same text republished across a set of syndication sites, identical wording on each, usually on domains nobody reads. Google’s guidance is that links in promotional material of this kind should be qualified with a sponsored or nofollow attribute — which the better distributors do and the cheaper ones do not.

The packages sold locally as “press release distribution — 200 backlinks included” are the pattern our link building article describes at length. Duplicated text, no editorial judgement, links acquired through a commercial arrangement.

That does not make releases useless. A release is a reasonable way to put a fact on the record where anyone can find it, and it gives a journalist writing about you something to check against. Judge it as documentation. Do not buy it as links.

When the coverage has no link

You get quoted. Your firm is named. There is no link, because the journalist did not add one and the desk did not either.

Ask. Once, briefly, to the person who wrote it: thank them, note that the firm is mentioned in paragraph six, and say a link would help readers who want the underlying figures. Point at the specific page that supports the claim, not your homepage.

A reasonable proportion of these get added, because it costs the publication nothing and improves the piece. Some do not, because house policy forbids it, in which case do not ask twice.

The version that fails is a templated request from an outreach tool sent by somebody who did not read the article.

Nofollow, and caring about it less than you do

Large Indian publications increasingly qualify outbound links with nofollow or ugc attributes. Some mark every external link that way as policy.

The temptation is to treat that coverage as worthless. It is not.

Google has described these attributes as hints rather than absolute instructions, and separately, a mention in a publication your buyers read does things a followed link does not — people search your name afterwards, and that behaviour is visible in your own analytics whatever the attribute says.

There is also a sequencing point. Coverage in a recognised publication is frequently what makes the next journalist say yes. Refusing it over an attribute is optimising the wrong variable.

Take the coverage. And once a link does land, make sure it goes somewhere useful — carrying it to the pages that convert is a separate job that most sites never do.

Who in your company actually does this

The usual failure is structural rather than tactical.

Every pitch described here requires somebody who knows the subject well enough to say something true, specific and quotable, within hours, without clearing it through three people. That is a senior person. In most Indian SMEs it is a founder or a practice head.

The activity is nevertheless handed to a junior executive with a media list, because it looks like outreach and outreach looks junior. They send announcements, because announcements are all they have access to, and the programme produces nothing for six months and is then cancelled.

The split that works is straightforward. The junior monitors the alerts, keeps the list of who covers what, finds the right name for each pitch, and handles the sending and the single follow-up. The senior person writes the three sentences that carry the actual opinion.

Two hours a week of senior time, spent this way, outperforms a retainer spent on distribution. That is an uncomfortable thing for an agency to write down, and it happens to be true.

What we cannot tell you

We cannot give you a response rate. Published figures for pitch success are collected in different markets, by companies selling outreach tools, using definitions that suit them. Ours would be a sample of one agency’s experience and we are not going to dress that up as a benchmark.

We can tell you the shape of it: most pitches produce nothing, a small number produce a reply, and a smaller number produce coverage. Anyone quoting you a percentage is guessing or selling.

We also cannot tell you what a nofollow link contributes, because Google has not said and no reliable external test has settled it.

Final thoughts

The Indian media inbox is defended against a specific thing — people trying to buy their way in. Every effective pitch is a demonstration that you are not doing that.

Be available on the day something happens. Bring a number nobody else has. Tell someone politely that they are wrong.

None of that is fast, and none of it can be bought, which is precisely why it still works.

If you want help identifying the twenty people who actually cover your sector, and what to send them, you can reach out to us on whatsapp at +91 7738844851 .